Beauty, Mercy, Justice

Archive for January 24th, 2012

Man has the right to live. He has the right to bodily integrity and to the means necessary for the proper development of life, particularly food, clothing, shelter, medical care, rest, and, finally, the necessary social services. In consequence, he has the right to be looked after in the event of illhealth; disability stemming from his work; widowhood; old age; enforced unemployment; or whenever through no fault of his own he is deprived of the means of livelihood.

Moreover, man has a natural right to be respected. He has a right to his good name. He has a right to freedom in investigating the truth, and—within the limits of the moral order and the common good—to freedom of speech and publication, and to freedom to pursue whatever profession he may choose. He has the right, also, to be accurately informed about public events.

He has the natural right to share in the benefits of culture, and hence to receive a good general education, and a technical or professional training consistent with the degree of educational development in his own country. Furthermore, a system must be devised for affording gifted members of society the opportunity of engaging in more advanced studies, with a view to their occupying, as far as possible, positions of responsibility in society in keeping with their natural talent and acquired skill.

Also among man’s rights is that of being able to worship God in accordance with the right dictates of his own conscience, and to profess his religion both in private and in public. According to the clear teaching of Lactantius, “this is the very condition of our birth, that we render to the God who made us that just homage which is His due; that we acknowledge Him alone as God, and follow Him. It is from this ligature of piety, which binds us and joins us to God, that religion derives its name.”

“The West was separated from the East not only by political and theological factors: there was also an apparent cultural difference, conditioned to a significant degree by the use of Latin in the West and Greek in the East. Different cultural contexts contributed to differences in theological approaches, and vice versa. When reading Byzantine polemical treatises against the Latins or Latin diatribes against the Byzantines, one is struck by how theological accusations were permeated with various reproaches of a purely cultural nature. The ‘Encyclical Letter’ by Patriarch Photius is but one of many such examples. Being dedicated to the important question of the procession of the Holy Spirit, it begins with petty accusations against various liturgical and domestic customs of the Latins, such as fasting on Saturdays. Even if one takes into account that such accusations were advanced in the heat of the polemics and were part of a developed propaganda strategy, it is still evident that even minor cultural differences were regarded by both sides as grave deviations from Tradition. This, in turn, resulted from people’s inability to cross the borders of their own cultural contexts. (Maximus the Confessor’s attempt, in his ‘Letter to Marinus’, to look at the Filioque question from the Western perspective is a rare and extrinsic example of the opposite).”